


The Calvin AU

by psocoptera



Category: Kairos (O'Keefe) Series - Madeleine L'Engle
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Siblings, Break-it fic, Gen, Infidelity, bullet point fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-23 19:24:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21325387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psocoptera/pseuds/psocoptera
Summary: In which Calvin is secretly Meg's half-brother.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 12





	The Calvin AU

**Author's Note:**

> A friend reading Wrinkle In Time for the first time earlier this year read the scene early in the book where Meg and Calvin compare a photo of Mr. Murry to Calvin and thought Calvin might be going to turn out to be Meg's secret half-brother.
> 
> I was fascinated by what that would do to the story, what happens to the emotional arc if you remove Calvin as Meg's romantic reward object. (Look, I love their relationship, but a huge part of his role in the books is to validate her as romantically lovable.) Please note, this is *not* "how the story might have been written if that was where L'Engle was going" but rather "what if everything else was still the same, what does this mess up". Sort of the polar opposite of fix-it fic; break-it fic, I suppose. :) Also of course "how could you even write that change into the backstory/Mr. Murry how could you."
> 
> For people who need to know the level of incest content before reading, there are complicated emotions but no physical contact once the situation is known. I'm not tagging for incest because I think a more accurate tag would be the successful avoiding of incest.
> 
> Also, this is bullet point fic, which is a new thing for me but seemed to fit what I wanted to do here. :)

**A Wrinkle In Lineage**

\- So, first, the backstory. Calvin is not more than two years older than Meg, maybe only a year or so. Here's what happened: Alex Murry knew Kate already, but they weren't together. He was a postdoc, and she was still in grad school, and she knew that if they got married, she'd be expected to leave her program and her advisor would give her place in his lab to another student. Kate was traditional enough to not want to be with Alex without marrying him... but they had an understanding... but she had said she didn't expect him to wait for her, that she couldn't guarantee how long it would take her to finish her thesis. (She was closer than she realized, her research just about to yield up the results she needed.)

\- Alex took a one-year position at MIT to collaborate with someone in particular, and a long, slow, meandering drive that summer up from wherever they were to get there. On his way through the back roads of Connecticut, he met Beezie O'Keefe, helping out at her friend's summer fruit stand. She was a married mother of two, but she'd married very young, and her hair was still golden and her eyes were very blue and very sad, and for three nights he stayed at the little motor lodge up the road and she came to him when her babies were asleep and he told her things that Hubble had learned about galaxies, and she kissed him because he looked her in the eyes and didn't smell like whisky, and he kissed her because when he did she looked a little less sad.

\- The letter from Beezie saying she'd had a baby came the same day as the letter from Kate saying she had scheduled her defense. Beezie didn't ask for anything - she might have asked for money, that difference between them had been obvious - but she didn't, only said that she'd had another baby, and she thought he might be the father, and deserved to know, and her husband didn't know and she wanted to keep it that way. Kate didn't ask for anything either, but when she came out from her defense, elated and hands still shaking a little, Alex was there with a ring.

\- It was Kate's idea to buy the old farmhouse, and to spend their summers in Connecticut. She knew about Calvin - of course she knew, Alex had told her, almost right away, before the ring had had time to make a dent or a white line in her skin, when she could still give it back and walk away without even that much of a mark. Kate was traditional, but not that traditional. She was the woman who would teach her daughter to love so fiercely and unconditionally that her love could defeat IT and Echthroi. Of course she wouldn't accept Alex passing through Beezie's life like a transient comet. They were going to orbit properly, periodically, close enough to be useful if it ever seemed right. So they came back in the summers, all the way from New Mexico, and from Florida, pulling a trailer packed with Kate's equipment because maybe Alex could work in the summers on paper, but Kate needed her lab. (And she liked working at the farmhouse better, anyways - Alex always insisted they find her space somewhere, wherever he went, but it was never quite enough, and people were always walking off with her flasks and reagents like they weren't quite convinced she was really using them.)

\- Alex asked Beezie before they bought the house. Mrs. O'Keefe, to him, by then. The fruit stand was gone, but Alex went to her house while Paddy was at work and told her he wouldn't do it if she asked him not to. She shrugged, and didn't look him in the eyes, a big stain down the front of her dress and paint peeling on the clapboards, and Alex knew that if he handed her all the money in his wallet she would just throw it back at him and slam the door. "What's it to me," she said finally, and he had wondered, horribly, if his memories of how direct she had been in his bed, how sure, were lies. "I won't, then," he said, "I'm sorry," and she had put her hand on his wrist, just once, the last time she would ever touch him, the same way she had first touched him that summer, and told him his wife should do her shopping at the grocer out on Wiltshire, the prices were better than the grocer in town.

\- The O'Keefes go to the Catholic church, and the Murrys mostly don't go at all, because experiments don't know about Sundays, and when they do they go to Trinity Episcopal. There's no school in the summers to gather up children, and the woods and fields are wide enough that little explorers rarely encounter each other. When a Murry crosses paths with an O'Keefe, it's usually Kate and Mrs. O'Keefe at the grocery, nodding civilly and silently. Kate occasionally contrives, with the scientifically precise timing with which she manages her projects in the lab, to "accidentally" transfer a bag of just-purchased groceries into Mrs. O'Keefe's shopping cart as they both check out and exit. Tricky, with Mrs. O'Keefe's sharp eyes, and inevitable several children along who mustn't see anything either, but worth it to slip her a bag of plums or oranges, an extra pound of butter, an extra jar of jam.

\- Calvin doesn't stand out from his older and younger siblings, at first. Toddling around the grocery store, he might be a little taller, a little skinnier, a little more inclined to mind his mother. Kate sneaks glances between Calvin and little Meg, who is a squashy tomato-faced baby (and, later, very little inclined to mind her mother) and there isn't much resemblance. She believes Beezie, though, that she had looked into her baby's newborn face and known something that nobody else could see yet.

\- So, jump a decade or so later. The Murrys have moved to Connecticut for good, since Mr. Murry was going to be traveling so much, and then letters from Alex have stopped, and sometimes Kate wishes if she was going to get stuck in limbo it could have been somewhere a little bigger, somewhere with colleagues and sympathetic casserole-bearing faculty spouses and neighbors who wouldn't look at her sidelong. Kate had never imagined Connecticut without Alex, not permanently. There's Louise Colubra, who comes to dinner on Sundays when she's not at someone's bedside, and there's the lab. Kate is in the lab when Meg walks in with Calvin O'Keefe, and it takes all of Kate's poise to shake hands with him and tell him it's nice to meet him.

\- He *does* look like Alex now, a fourteen-year-old red-headed young Alex. Having him appear in her lab like that, years after she'd given up hope of them ever really knowing him, she wants to believe it's a sign, the second herald, if Mrs. Whatsit was the first, or maybe Telemachus coming home ahead of Odysseus. She swallows her reaction when he says he feels like he's not alone any more, and feeds him five bowls of stew, and has to fight the temptation to fetch him one of Alex's sweaters that would actually come all the way down his bony wrists. (And then she sends him out for a walk with Meg, and the next time she sees him he's brought Alex home: Calvin really was a sign, a key, and if they hadn't bought the farmhouse - if Alex had never spent those three nights with Beezie - maybe Alex never would have made it home at all.)

\- But, okay, Alex. We're going to ignore that Alex says "who's Calvin" when Meg calls out for him. He's been imprisoned, he's profoundly disoriented, he knows he's lost track of the days and weeks but Meg and little Charles Wallace seem *much* bigger than they should be, and also he thought that if a rescue ever arrived it would be someone else from the tesseract program, not his children.

\- He always wanted to offer Calvin some kind of overpaid summer job, to quietly supply him with shoes and bicycles and tutoring. "Tesseract rescue mission" was not what he was picturing. Now that they're here, though, Calvin feels more like a young colleague than like one of his children who needs protecting, at least in contrast to Charles Wallace and Meg. Like someone's undergrad, able to sit in on the lab meetings. It's a shock when the angels agree that it has to be Meg who goes back for Charles Wallace - Meg who he almost just lost too - and then a completely different shock when Calvin kisses her before she goes. Calvin has told him a little bit about himself by then. It's obvious he has no idea Alex might be his father. But it still hadn't occurred to Alex there might be anything like that between him and Meg.

\- Alex thinks about telling him, during the awful, silent wait on Ixchel. He deserves to know that he's losing a maybe-sister, if they lose her. (Alex has never been quite as sure as Kate, as Beezie.) Or if they don't lose her, if they are granted a miracle, Calvin needs to know it can't be like that between them. But the tension and anxiety are too much for him to get the words out. And then they're back at the farmhouse, the joyous reunion, and Kate crying and crying, and eventually he realizes Calvin has gone home at some point and he still hasn't said anything.

\- "He kissed Meg. We have to tell him," he says at some point, 3 am or 4, somewhere between telling about Camazotz, and IT, and calling Washington. Kate, always disciplined, has been taking frantic notes, but she doesn't write that down. "No, no," she says, denying it, unlike the other planets or the giant brain. "He's like a new big brother for her." "No, he's not," Alex says, who remembers being fourteen, who had girlfriends before Kate. He's suddenly afraid that telling Calvin might not be enough. "We have to tell *Meg*." Kate's only known Calvin for a day but she already adores him. "You can't think he would - " "Is it really so crazy to think the child conceived in adultery might struggle more with temptation than the child conceived in wedlock?" Alex snaps. His brief affair with Beezie has felt for a long time like it happened on a planet even farther away than Camazotz - he hadn't really understood, he told himself, before he got married himself, but he doesn't understand how she could. Why he did. "Every child is a gift from God and Calvin twice as much because he brought you home," Kate says, because Kate's had the easy part, all she's ever had to do is forgive. "If we hadn't gotten married so fast, if you hadn't gotten pregnant on our wedding night, they wouldn't be so close in age," Alex says, trying to bargain in retrospect. "If we'd managed to introduce them sooner there wouldn't have been the question of attraction." He's full of regrets, of despair, and Kate is starting to see that the cheerful, calm optimist who left for the tesseract project hasn't come home unaffected by his long battle with IT. She's going to have to keep being strong. "I'll tell them," Kate says, because ultimately, she believes in truth, and the necessity and rightness of it. "I'll tell them."

**The Close of a Door**

\- The news about their relationship is a lot easier for Calvin than for Meg. Calvin overwhelmingly wants a connection to the Murry family, to be *part* of the Murry family - when Mrs. Murry pours him cocoa and tells him that they moved to Connecticut because fifteen years ago, her husband knew his mother, it feels like only good news. It feels like a confirmation of every thought he's ever had about being a sport and a misfit and a validation of his instant fit with the Murrys. A blood relationship is a surer tie than he ever could have hoped for. He prides himself on his rationality, so it's easy to attribute what he had thought was his attraction to Meg to unconscious familial recognition and his concern for the risks she was facing. It's easy to distance himself a little from Meg, to throw himself into big-brothering Charles Wallace and soaking up the interest, advice, and careful affection of Mr. and Mrs. Murry.

\- For Meg it's like the slamming of a door she had barely realized was open. Her mother tells her first, and she's in her room in the attic the next time Calvin comes over, sulking and trying not to cry. It's ridiculous, she tells herself, acting like she lost something when her new friend turned out to be another brother. Her mother had been matter-of-fact about it, *she* hadn't acted like there was anything to pity Meg about, so what's Meg's excuse for being so full of pity for herself? Yes, if she'd ever had time to think about it, she might have thought she'd like Calvin to kiss her again, but she hasn't had time to think about that, hardly, between saving Charles Wallace and her father coming home. Maybe she would have started to imagine what it might be like to have Calvin's attention at school - even the teachers might look more warmly at someone Calvin O'Keefe thought was worthwhile - but she hasn't imagined it, hardly, and anyways he still might acknowledge her, carefully.

-Meg had asked right away (as Calvin had known not to bother) if Mrs. O'Keefe knew that the Murrys were going to tell Calvin. Her mother had said that Mrs. O'Keefe wasn't someone who could be talked to about this kind of thing any more, but out of respect for her, it was still vital that the secret not be spread around. Meg had nodded, determined to be the sort of person who *could* talk about it, and she knows, hot-faced in the attic, that she needs to go downstairs and keep being that person, someone who can hug Calvin as a sister and tell him she's so glad. Sitting in her kitchen, beaming at her mother, he's even more handsome than he's ever been, and the way his smile stiffens when he sees her, the way it becomes deliberate, and controlled, is a loss so deep and devastating that it clearly can't be real, and can only be dismissed as some last artifact of the Black Thing, to be ignored and risen above.

\- School gets a little bit better for Meg. All her teachers want to be generous now that her father's back, and there's something in her now, after Camazotz, that the "failure" label can't stick to, some knowledge of the measure of herself that can't help but communicate itself and shade everyone's impressions. It hurts when Calvin starts going around with one of the junior girls - she's sweet, and studious, and even comes along and helps Meg with her English homework sometimes when Calvin stops by to chat with Charles Wallace, and Meg swings between resentment and a sort of crushing resignation that Calvin probably never would have seriously gone for Meg anyways when that was the competition. Charles Wallace gets impatient with her moping; he says that he got the wrong impression too, but that the important thing is that Calvin is part of their family now.

\- (Of course Charles Wallace knows. He feels Meg's shock as soon as it hits her, and he answers "I think somehow I did know" as soon as he's told. He's the only one to ask about Mr. Murry, if it's been very hard for him, if he's very sad about Calvin's mother. Even Mrs. Murry's composure falters in the bizarre circumstances of discussing her husband's long-ago extramarital affair with her precocious five year old, and it falls to Calvin, in the end, to encourage Charles Wallace to think of it as a mysterious matter of ancient history. "Because my mother might as well be a fossil, now," he says grimly, and then shrugs it aside: he's been reading Charles Wallace _The Little Prince_, and that's much more worthy of their time than Calvin's lost-cause mother.)

\- When Charles Wallace gets sick, and the dragons appear in the garden, and Blajeny tells them that Meg and Calvin are called along with Charles Wallace, Meg doesn't get the warmth of Calvin's arm around her, or his hand in her hand, but she muddles along, at first. When she starts working with Proginoskes, she flinches the first time the cherubim mentions love - it's a sore spot, a guilty place - but Progo eases her around it, recenters her on Charles Wallace. Where a different Meg would have said she felt most like herself when she was with Calvin, this Meg draws strength thinking about Ixchel, about Aunt Beast and Mrs. Whatsit, about connections with strangers far removed from her tangled family. When she has to choose the true Mr. Jenkins, Proginoskes never reminds her about Calvin's shoes, but she's still able to pick out the human from the extremes.

\- The differences are so tiny, really. When they go to Metron Ariston, Meg doesn't sit next to Calvin, and he doesn't smile at her. When they imagine night into day she looks away from the blue of Calvin's eyes. When they go inside the mitochondrion - well, she can't open herself to Calvin, not when it's a fundamental permanent necessity that she can never do that, but she can kythe to Proginoskes, and the Echthroi pain only hurts a little more without Calvin's math to distract her. When she's trying to explain the situation to Mr. Jenkins, she's never had a perfect memory of silent communion in the woods, as happy and joyous and close as it was possible to be, but neither has Mr. Jenkins, and she reaches out to him as one outsider to another, asking him to believe through loneliness and disappointment like she's had to. When she's trying to hold it all together, trying to fill the Echthroi with love, with Meg, and she isn't quite enough - can't hold Charles Wallace and Calvin and Mr. Jenkins, even with Proginoskes giving all of himself away, and she feels Mr. Jenkins slip out of her hold, lost forever - well, they're inside a mitochondrion. It's still a tiny difference. Everything is tiny, right now.

\- They reappear in Charles Wallace's room, Meg and Calvin, and Meg hugs Charles Wallace while she lets Calvin explain where they've been. The twins doubt her but they don't doubt Calvin. They haven't been told he's their big brother by blood, but they know he's been adopted into the big brother role, and he's cool, he's popular, they respect him in a way they've never respected Meg.

\- There is still school to be faced, for Charles Wallace, and no Mr. Jenkins to promise reforms. No Mr. Jenkins - Meg panics, a little, wondering who needs to be told. "He was just... negated," she stammers to her mother, "There won't be a, a body, and nobody will believe - " "Probably best to just let the processes proceed," her mother tells her, her mother who knows the missing-person processes intimately. "He was brave, though," Meg says. "He came with us. Someone should know." "*You* know," Charles Wallace says, and what else is there. Calvin and Mrs. Murry and everyone are trooping down to the kitchen, planning a feast, and Progo is gone and Mr. Jenkins is gone, everyone she'd kythed most deeply in Yadah.

\- It's like Deepening, Calvin tells her after dinner. Finding the Murrys... learning his true identity... he thinks he knows how Sporos feels, settled into his right place. Meg wraps her arms around herself and tells him she's glad.

**A Further Tilted Planet**

\- The Thanksgiving that the missiles almost fall, Calvin brings his mother and his pregnant wife to the Murrys' Thanksgiving dinner. Tessa is very smart and very pretty, kind, and friendly, and she believes passionately in Calvin's work, having met him at school while he was working on his M.D./Ph.D. Meg has tried dating, lost her virginity with a friend in college and had a thing for awhile with a former TA in her graduate program, but she doesn't know how Calvin did it, how she's supposed to make it work with someone who never learned to kythe. Well, maybe Tessa can kythe. How would Meg know.

\- (She's occasionally wondered, if Mr. Jenkins hadn't died, if something would have eventually happened between them. It feels wrong and gross to imagine - he's an old man in her child memories, with dandruff and a smell of old hair cream and rancid deodorant - but she's had professors whose wives are nearly as young. Maybe he would have eventually seemed like a sort of Edward Rochester figure. Not that Meg ever much liked Edward Rochester. Still, they'd found a kinship of loneliness, in that last day of his life. And he would remember Proginoskes. Maybe a Professor Bhaer would have looked appealing in the absence of a Laurie. Weird to think about it, how things could have played out differently.)

\- The big family Thanksgiving is Calvin's idea, some sort of long-held secret fantasy of having all of his family at one table. He'd gone to the courthouse to get married because it hadn't felt right to have a wedding where he couldn't acknowledge the Murrys as family. But Tessa's parents are in Michigan, and the twins have known about Calvin since they got back from the past, so they can have a Thanksgiving without secrets.

\- It's not going well. Mrs. O'Keefe - Mrs. O'Keefe the older, the one who isn't Tessa - looks old enough to be Kate Murry's mother, and stares at her through rheumy, narrowed eyes, and she's responding to all of Kate's conversational sallies with monosyllables. Alex keeps looking between them and wincing. Calvin's smile has gone stiff and he's being attentive to Tessa to the point where she tells him to stop hovering, pulling him down next to her on the sofa and making him sit, hand held firmly in both of hers. The house is full of tension even before the phone call about imminent nuclear war.

\- It's a comfort to him that they're all together, Calvin tells them, the turkey done, and Alex and Kate and Beezie all at the same table after so many years. He's sitting next to Tessa and hasn't stopped touching her once since the phone call. Tessa has her hand on her belly and looks pale. If the world ends tonight, Meg will never know how that feels, she thinks.

\- Mrs. O'Keefe is staring at her across the table. "You're like me," she says suddenly, in her croaking voice. "The losers, huh? Got left behind." Meg absolutely does not want to be identified with this half-toothless stoop-shouldered old crone, but, horribly, she can see what Mrs. O'Keefe means, the way Calvin and Tessa mirror Meg's parents, the way Mrs. O'Keefe is left to watch. It's a relief when Mrs. O'Keefe starts leading Charles Wallace through St. Patrick's Rune.

\- Then there's a unicorn, and some time travel, and some racism about blue eyes vs dark faces that will bother Meg for years when she thinks about it later. But setting that aside, what hits Meg the hardest is when Charles Wallace time-travels into Chuck Maddox, and Meg gets to see Beezie, young and merry and beautiful. Oh, she thinks. She's never, never understood how her father could have done it, but teen Beezie loved stories, and fireflies, and the young adult Alex had met must still have had more in common with that girl than with the bitter old woman she became.

\- And she can't wish it undone. If Charles Wallace, as Chuck, could pass a word to Beezie - could warn her against handsome young strangers driving through on their way to better places - Meg wouldn't ask him to. What happened to Beezie started long before Alex. And what happened to Meg... maybe she's hopelessly loved Calvin all these years in a not-quite-sisterly way, maybe part of her always will, but that doesn't have to doom her to being another Beezie (or another Mr. Jenkins). She'll be a good aunt. She'll write a good dissertation. She could do all sorts of things, if the world just doesn't end tonight.

\- When Matthew sends Zillah to Bran, despite loving her himself, oh, how Meg understands.

\- She goes running to the star-watching rock with Mrs. O'Keefe, Calvin following them, and they wake up Charles Wallace. Meg walks back hand in hand with Charles Wallace, and Calvin walks with his mother, who is leaning on him heavily. When they get back to the house, Meg watched her mother and Mrs. O'Keefe exchange a long, serious look, ending in solemn nods, and Mr. Murry takes Mrs. O'Keefe from Calvin and leads her tenderly over to the sofa. There's a nice moment between Mrs. O'Keefe and Tessa, who like the twins and Meg's parents has already forgotten there was ever a threat of nuclear war.

\- Meg remembers, though, and Charles Wallace, and, she realizes, Calvin, who for the first time in years is looking at her like he really sees her. She gives him that same respectful nod her mother had exchanged with Mrs. O'Keefe: forgiveness, acceptance, approval; and he nods back. 

\- The baby is a boy, and Calvin and Tessa name him Bran, in remembrance of Beezie.

**Arms, Lotuses, Etc**

\- What happens to Adam Eddington and Zachary Gray in the absence of Polyhymnia O'Keefe is left as an exercise for the reader.


End file.
